2

“You’re absolutely right,” Mooney said the next morning at nine through a mouthful of doughnut.

He wasn’t talking to me. Lieutenant Joseph Mooney of the Boston Police Department rarely says things like “absolutely right” when he’s talking to me. He was addressing the phone, and from the look on his face he’d been murmuring polite little nothings for some time, doing a lot more listening than talking, and not particularly liking what he heard.

He yawned, carefully turning away and covering the receiver with one hand so the listener on the other end couldn’t catch the noise. He had a dab of powdered sugar on his chin.

As soon as I’d entered his cubbyhole at Southie’s old D Street station, he’d nodded me into a chair and winked. Not really winked. He has this trick where he lowers the eyelid of his left eye. No squint. No wrinkles. It looks like half his face has fallen asleep.

I tapped my chin on the spot corresponding to his powdered sugar. He picked up on it immediately, rubbing his jaw. Mooney and I communicate well, part gesture, part mind reading. It helped a lot when I worked for him.

Mooney’s got a good face, sleepy or not. Maybe a little too round, on the big-nosed side, definitely Irish. He used to be my boss when I was a cop. He’s still my friend, although it’s a complicated relationship. I’m getting so I hate the word relationship. There are romantic overtones and undertones, mostly coming from his side. On my side there’s a lot of warmth. Not heat. Warmth.

Mooney says I don’t know how to love a guy who attracts me as a friend. You know, a guy I enjoy, a guy I like to talk to. And considering my history with men, he may have a workable theory. Who knows? A relationship with Mooney might be okay, in a warm kind of way. But the wild and crazy chemistry’s not there. Mooney, who’s eight years older than me, nudging forty, says someday I’ll grow out of the wild-and-crazy-chemistry stage.

I say, who wants to?

Amid the jumble of printed forms, plastic coffee cups, crumpled papers, pens, and pencils on Mooney’s desk sat a newspaper. The Herald. I picked it up, although it’s not my paper of choice, wondering how they’d handled the Manuela Estefan story.

I found it on page seventeen, well after the important stuff like Norma Nathan’s gossip column.

While the Herald didn’t have anything the Globe hadn’t run, the tone of the piece was of the breathless, breaking-news variety. There were hints at “sexual mutilation” and a coy reference to a key discovery. The name Manuela Estefan was there.

Sexual mutilation would make it murder.

I wondered if Manuela Estefan was a common name, like Jane Smith.

Mooney grunted at the phone, sandwiching it between chin and shoulder while his hands frisked the desk and finally came up with a full cup of coffee. He must have been hiding it in a drawer. He raised his eyebrows at me, and I helped him wrestle the plastic cover off the cup. I wondered who was on the phone. The police commissioner? The mayor? A city councillor? Mooney didn’t suffer long telephone conversations as a rule.

His office didn’t offer much in the way of entertainment beyond the single wooden chair I was sitting on, and its hard seat didn’t encourage long visits. I knew where the coffee machine was, but the smell from Mooney’s cup was not tempting enough to draw me into the hall. I figured if there were any remaining doughnuts, Mooney would have pointed me in their direction. So I was left with the contemplation of either the Herald or Mooney’s ugly office, which didn’t sport so much as a poster on the cinder-block walls. Maybe he hadn’t had a chance to decorate since they’d moved him back to Homicide from his liaison position down at headquarters.

Come to think of it, he didn’t have a poster at his place on Berkeley Street either. Not even a plant. Bare desk. Bare walls.

I did a complete one-eighty and discovered a map tacked on the wooden door behind me. A close-up of the Back Bay with three pushpins stuck in fairly close together—red, white, and yellow. I stood up to take a look.

“I’ll get on it right away,” Mooney promised the telephone, and hung up so quickly that I got the feeling the guy on the other end was still talking.

“Carlotta,” Mooney said, shoving back his chair. “Sorry. I can’t talk. I’ve got a meeting downtown. I was trying to convince the bastards I’d be more use here, but—”

“I’ll drive you,” I said.

“Got the cab?”

“Nah, my car. You can make some flunky cruise you back in a unit.”

He studied his watch. I don’t think Mooney likes my driving.

“Hell,” he said. “Sure, why not?”

When we were settled in my red Toyota, seat-belted in and trying to wedge ourselves into an endless stream of traffic, I said, “I hear you got an ID on this Fens corpse.”

“That’s what they tell me,” Mooney said.

“You sure of it?”

“Why should I be sure of it yet, just because the papers are printing it?”

“You working it?” I asked.

“I didn’t exactly catch the squeal, but I’m involved.”

Like most cops, Mooney doesn’t give information away freely.

“Do you know if they have a picture ID,” I said casually, “or what?”

“Let me see,” he said, and I wondered if the pause was for recall or to stare at me out of the corner of his eye. “I think it’s a green card. The victim was an immigrant.”

“A green card,” I started to protest, “but—”

“But what?” Mooney said when I stopped abruptly.

“So that’s a picture, right?” I said.

“Yeah, but from what I understand, once the guy finished with the victim, she didn’t look so much like her picture.”

“I thought it was—how did the Herald put it?—sexual mutilation.”

“The brain is the ultimate sexual organ, Carlotta. I keep telling you that.”

“Not funny.”

“You haven’t been doing Homicide for a while, kiddo,” he said. “Everything’s funny on Homicide.”

A green card. That I didn’t understand at all. A green card is a permanent resident card, a ticket that entitles the holder to live and work in the U.S. for an unlimited time, a prized possession that can be used to apply for citizenship. Not a privilege granted to illegals.

I have had clients lie to me before.

“Where did the lady come from?” I asked. “You know yet?”

“We got her point of entry. Texas. Probably from someplace in Central America,” he said, gripping the door handle while I zoomed by a Buick that seemed afraid to take a tight curve. “Guatemala, El Salvador, maybe. I mean, think of the crap she must have gone through—all that shit down there—and then she goes for a walk through the Fens, and bingo, she’s a crime stat.”

Mooney winced as I made a sharp right to avoid a Volvo wagon that thought it owned the road. I could have just taken Dorchester Avenue to East Berkeley Street, but I was trying to avoid the late commuter traffic, taking cabbie shortcuts. Mooney didn’t seem impressed. Of course I had to cross the Fort Point Channel somewhere, and bridges always get backed up. While we were sitting still, breathing exhaust from a heating-oil truck, I brought up the reason for my visit.

“Mooney,” I said. “Something funny happened yesterday.”

“Yeah?”

“It makes me think your green card ID may be wrong.”

“This I need to hear,” he said. “Watch out for that car.” It was well worth watching out for, a rust-eaten Plymouth Volare, hogging two lanes.

I gave him Manuela’s story, not word for word but pretty complete.

“And she just walked away,” he said with a deep sigh.

“Ran is more like it,” I said.

“I’m going to need a description.”

“I’m going to give you one,” I promised. “I already wrote it up. I’m cooperating.”

“Yeah. How come?”

I ignored that.

“Carlotta, am I going to have to remind you to stay out of homicide investigations?”

A Town Taxi tried to cut me off at the bridge. I refused to make eye contact, kept going, and he backed down. Mooney had his hand on the door handle—ready to jump, I suppose.

“Mooney,” I said gently, “you’ve got a homicide investigation. I don’t.”

“You’re just going to forget about this woman?” he said. “I believe that like I believe in Tinker Bell.”

“I didn’t say I was gonna forget about her. She hired me to do something. Something maybe you can help me with.”

“Aha,” Mooney said.

“Oho,” I responded. The Town Taxi was sitting on my rear bumper.

“You didn’t just drop by to give me indigestion driving like a lunatic?”

“That’s an extra,” I said. “And I’ve been driving conservatively, Mooney. If you’re in a hurry—”

“Forget it,” he said.

“Where do we stand on favors?” I asked.

That wasn’t quite fair. He owed me a big one and he knew it.

“What do you think I could help you with?” he said finally. “And watch out for that damn BMW.”

“Bimmers can take care of themselves,” I shot back. “You think he wants to crease that fancy paint? I thought you might be able to help retrieve my client’s green card. She needs it.”

“Carlotta, you lose a green card, you go to Immigration and fill out forty-seven forms in triplicate and they give you another one.”

“I have a feeling my client doesn’t want to go through the process again.”

“Shit,” Mooney said.

I followed a long line of cars that went through a yellow light at Park Square. I actually thought about stopping, but the Town Taxi behind me didn’t. He probably would have driven over me if I had.

“So?” I said. Mooney was looking around for a traffic cop. He could have looked for a long time.

“This meeting shouldn’t take too long.”

“Where have I heard that before?” I said.

“There’ll be a guy from INS there. Afterward we could talk, the three of us.”

“How long?”

“An hour, no longer.”

I screeched to a halt in front of headquarters. “I’ll pick the two of you up here in an hour,” I said.

“Absolutely not,” Mooney yelled, jumping out at the curb. “Ditch the car. Go buy yourself coffee and a doughnut across the street. We finish early, we’ll pick you up there. Otherwise be here, near the steps. Wherever we’re going, we’ll walk.”

“Absolutely not.” That’s the kind of thing Mooney usually says to me: “Absolutely not.”